I wiped my mac. Trying to rebuild my music in iTunes. Help!!

[iHavequestions]

What a nightmare!
I don't quite remember what happened, but I wiped my mac at some point. And some sequence of events happened that I'm blurry about. But now when I open iTunes, I see most music files have exclamation points. I do have almost all my music files backed up on an external hard drive. Some questions:

• How do I do a sweep and find all my files that has the exclamation point in mass?
• I tried to drag and drop from my external hard drive but given that I have 30K of music, it's taking forever... If I finally recreate my files from scratch, how do I retain all my previous ratings/info etc associated with each song?
• If I have both the exclamation point files as well as the files I dragged over, how do I delete the ones with the exclamation point in mass?
• Is this even the right approach for my situation? Is there a better way than doing this nightmarish approach?

 

[MCAsan]

Do a restore of the entire file system from the last Time Machine or CCC backup.

I hope you have a TM or CCC backup of the system.

 

[iHavequestions]

Do a restore of the entire file system from the last Time Machine or CCC backup.

I hope you have a TM or CCC backup of the system.

I can't seem to load the earlier ones from my external hard drive. Any step by step instructions on how to load the ones saved elsewhere?